Wayson Choy

profile by Joe Wiebe
posted November 15, 2004

Wayson Choy nearly died while writing his latest novel, All That Matters, which was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. The long-time Toronto resident was recently in Vancouver, where he grew up, and which he describes as “a place that’s slightly haunted for me.” He told me about his near-death experience in a conversation at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival.

“I know the date: August 9, 2001. I didn’t know it, but that day, all that week, there was a [smog] warning. That evening, 2:00 a.m., I woke up and I could only breathe in. If you have an asthma attack, the lungs are going into paralysis. I could breathe in but I couldn’t breathe out, so the carbon monoxide was building up.”

Friends took him to Emergency, where “they induced a coma so they could insert a ventilator and a pump to force the lungs open and closed. But I was eleven days in a coma, and on the third day, I had a heart attack, and there was two more following that, but they managed to save me. I was twenty-one days in the intensive care, and then four months in the hospital, and a year of recovery, before I went back to teach, and went back to my manuscript.”

The manuscript was an early draft of All That Matters, which he’d been working on since shortly after the publication of his first novel The Jade Peony, in 1995. Before his illness, Choy had thought the book was nearly done. But after his recovery, he felt dissatisfied with the manuscript. Initially, he wasn’t sure what the problem was.

He’d returned to teaching: “I only took on one or two classes, but I kept spinning my wheels on my manuscript. The other two books [The Jade Peony and a memoir called Paper Shadows] were written while I was working full time so what could be the problem?”

Part of his writer’s block could be attributed to the fact that he “had to relearn how to walk and hold a pencil and do all that stuff all over again” following his coma. “The muscles had atrophied from the brain connection so I had to reconnect by learning. I knew how to do it in my head, but I couldn’t get anything to work.”

Choy’s writing difficulties became so bad that he says he called his publisher, Maya Mavjee, the head of Doubleday, to ask, “Would you like your money back, or do you still want the book? And she said, absolutely, definitely. She even laughed at me for thinking otherwise.”

Eventually, with the help of Doubleday editor Martha Kanya-Forstner, he found his way back into the manuscript. Choy ended up re-writing the entire manuscript, over 700 pages, of which 500 found their way into All That Matters. “When I read the earlier manuscript and this one,” Choy says he can see that “the characters and the themes had deepened, simply because when you go through an experience like that and you recover, you’re just not the same again, which then enriched the book, and my understanding of what I wanted to write about, what I wanted to say.”

All That Matters is a richly textured book, layered with complex themes and wonderfully perceptive descriptions that bring Vancouver’s Chinatown of the 1920s to ‘40s to vibrant life. Readers who enjoyed The Jade Peony will recognize many of the characters and story elements. Though this new book has been called a sequel, Choy calls it a companion to his earlier novel.

“All That Matters is a story about Chinatown told from the First Son’s point-of-view,” Choy explains. He is referring to Kiam-Kim, the eldest son in the Chen family who is only three years old in 1926 when he, his father, and his grandmother arrive in “Gold Mountain,” as Chinese immigrants described Canada, their land of opportunity, at the time.

Originally, Kiam’s story was to be told in The Jade Peony, which is divided among the viewpoints of his three younger siblings. But Choy says, “The publisher, the editor and my agent came to me and said Kiam-Kim is the First Son; he went with the patriarchal side of Chinatown. The Jade Peony is about the matriarch.” So, Kiam-Kim’s story was saved for All That Matters. “I realized that the books are the yin and yang of the same coin. But they’re independent of each other, because the First Son sees the world differently with more responsibility and more knowledge, but at the same time is caught more vividly in the changes of his world.”

One of the hallmarks of Choy’s writing is the intimate detail he provides of life in Chinatown between the two world wars. By showing that community through the day-to-day activities of a close-knit family, Choy gives readers the opportunity to sense what life was really like. Many of the family scenes are set around the dinner table, and the descriptions of food are mouth-watering.

“I looked at cookbooks of that period food, Cantonese village cooking, and looked at the ingredients,” Choy told me. “Food is part of how we love each other. You prepare something well for those you love, and that strengthens the family.”

When I told him how hungry those scenes often made me, he laughed. “People are always saying to me that they’re reading it, and then they call out to somebody, let’s order Chinese tonight.”

But life in Chinatown was not always pleasant. After all, this was a time when Chinese citizens were still very much dispossessed and disenfranchised within Canadian society. “I wanted to write the truth about the Chinese community. The community had internalized the oppression. They hated being treated badly by racists yet they were racists themselves, as in all immigrant communities.”

Writing the truth is an important theme in Choy’s writing, and indeed in his life in general, especially since his life nearly ended back in August, 2001. The title, All That Matters, comes from Confucius, who once said, “With words, all that matters is to express the truth.” This resonated with the author, because “in my book, all my characters are struggling to speak the truth—their truth—and then discovering the parallels and paradoxes of what truth means.”

Considering the difficulties the sixty-five-year-old author endured writing this novel, I wondered if he would even consider writing another.

“Well, a lot of people want to know about Poh-Poh [Kiam-Kim’s grandmother],” Choy responded. “I’ve only told a third of what I know about her from my research, because I did a lot of academic research about the women of China in that area.” Anyone who has read either novel will surely be excited about this prospect; Poh-Poh is a marvelous character who embodies the values of the Old World left behind in China Although she is a stern matriarch, she is beloved by her family and readers alike.

Wayson Choy was honoured that this novel was shortlisted for the 2004 Giller Prize, thought he predicted that Alice Munro would win, which indeed was the case. But don’t be deterred by the fact that he didn’t win; All That Matters is definitely one the must-read books of 2004.

Joe Wiebe lives in Vancouver, just a little south of Chinatown.